Learning about EC2 pricing options
The Amazon EC2 service is a cloud offering that enables you to deploy virtual servers (EC2 instances) in the cloud. Traditionally, in an on-premises environment, if you needed to deploy a new physical server, you would have to make a capital investment for a few thousand dollars to procure the necessary hardware and software and then configure your server with any necessary applications.
On AWS, EC2 instances can be procured on an hourly basis, which means that you only pay for the hours that the server is running. If you turn off the server but keep it in your account (as opposed to terminating it and releasing its capacity back to AWS), then you do not pay any charges while the EC2 instance is in this stopped state. This pricing approach is what we call the On-Demand Pricing Option and is the default option when purchasing EC2 instances on AWS.
Let's look at these various pricing options in detail.
